Page 143 of Night of Shadows
She stops walking. Ciaran stops with her.
She says, across thirty feet of airport floor, in the soft voice of a woman who has been carrying a sentence for seven years and is now allowing herself to put it down, ‘"Eleni."‘
I say, ‘"Brigid."‘
We walk. We meet in the middle of the international arrivals hall. I am sixty-eight years old and she’s eighty-two and we do not embrace immediately because we have been writing letters for seven years and we have a sequence we have not yet agreed on for how the first meeting begins.
She solves it.
She takes my hands. Both of them. Her hands are cool and dry, and the wedding band on her left ring finger is the wedding band Patrick O'Brien put there in 1965, and she’s not taken it off since he died in 1991. I know this because she told me in a letter in 2021. She holds my hands, and she looks at my face.
She says, ‘"Céad míle fáilte."‘
A hundred thousand welcomes.
I cry. Not visibly. Quietly. In a way, Greek mothers cry when they have been carrying the weight of a friendship that didn’thave a body for seven years, and now it has a body, and the body is in front of them, and the friendship is real.
I say, in Greek, "Welcome home."‘
Brigid doesn’t speak Greek. She’s been studying Greek in correspondence for two years, and we both know it. She nods at the cadence, and she answers in Irish, ‘"Tá tú istigh sa chroí agam,"‘ which she’s told me means ‘you are in my heart,’ and which I have written down in a notebook in my kitchen so I would have the phrase when I needed it.
Cathleen has been standing six feet away during this. Quiet. Watching. The mother of the bride is giving the matriarchs their first minute alone.
Brigid sees Cathleen. She lets go of my hands. She reaches for Cathleen's.
She says, ‘"You are Brendan's sister."‘
Cathleen says, ‘"I am."‘
Brigid says, "He used to come into the Black Rose on Tuesday afternoons. He would order whiskey, neat, and sit at the end of the bar and talk to the bartender about whatever the bartender wanted to talk about. He was kind. He was kind to my Patrick when Patrick was dying. I never told him so. I am telling you now."‘
Cathleen doesn’t speak.
She presses her forehead against Brigid's forehead. Two old women in coats, in an airport, with a priest holding a roller bag behind them, and a Greek matriarch beside them, and the weight of a wedding hours away.
I take Brigid's bag. Ciaran takes Cathleen's. We walk out into the February cold.
? ? ?
My kitchen at 5:43 PM.
The Greek coffee is on the stove. The ‘kourabiedes’ I baked at 9:00 AM are on a plate on the counter. Brigid is at my kitchen table in the chair where Maeve sits on Sunday afternoons. Her green coat is hanging on the hook by the door. Cathleen has gone home to change for the rehearsal dinner. Father Ciaran is in my living room reading the Boston Globe and not pretending to be invisible because Greek mothers do not require their guests to pretend to be invisible.
Brigid says, ‘"I have been waiting seven years to sit at this table."‘
I say, ‘"And I have been waiting seven years to put coffee in front of you."‘
I pour. The coffee is the small careful ritual I have been doing for sixty years. Brigid watches my hands. She’s good hands herself. The hands of a woman who buttered scones in her own kitchen for an Irish priest who came over on Tuesdays during her husband's last months.
She lifts the cup. She drinks. She closes her eyes.
She says, ‘"My God."‘
I say, ‘"It is the Greek coffee. You will get used to it."‘
She says, ‘"I do not want to get used to it. I want it to be a thing I have only once in my life on the day before my friend's son marries my brother's daughter."‘
She’s not my friend's son. Lex is my son. But she said it the way she said it because Brigid O'Brien has been treating my son like her son in her letters for two years now, since Maeve and Nora started spending Sunday afternoons in my kitchen and Brigid started asking after them by name in every letter.
